Pricing/Overclocking

Athlon Prices in 1,000 unit quantities (source: AMD)
	200MHz Athlons	266MHz Athlons
Athlon 850	$193	N/A
Athlon 900	$215	N/A
Athlon 950	$282	N/A
Athlon 1,000MHz	$350	$385
Athlon 1,100MHz/1,133MHz	$460	$506
Athlon 1,200MHz	$612	$673

As you can see in the pricing chart above, the 266MHz processors officially cost about 10% more than their 200MHz counterparts.

Unlike previous processor launches, the 266MHz parts will be a little harder for end users to find on retail shelves upon launch. We're not saying it will be impossible to find a 266MHz Athlon processor this Christmas, but AMD doesn't expect widespread availability until the first quarter of 2001.

A look at the system

Up and running

With 200MHz 1.2GHz Athlon's still hard to find in stock at most retailers, we won't make any predictions about the availability of the 266MHz parts. However, finding 266MHz 1.0GHz and 1.13GHz parts in stock should likely be easier than finding 266MHz 1.2GHz processors.

Overclocking

As we mentioned on the previous page, AMD hasn't implemented any new measures to prevent overclocking. This means you can adjust the clock multiplier once you've closed the L1 bridges on the top of the processor.

With a motherboard that allows clock multiplier adjustment, you can dial in the multiplier you want and begin overclocking your CPU. Traditionally, the ASUS A7V and ABIT KT7/KT7-RAID were the only motherboards that allowed clock multiplier adjustment. However, motherboards from FIC (the AZ11 Enhanced), AOpen (the AK73 Pro) and MSI (K7T Pro 2) also allow multiplier adjustment. We'll be providing our first reviews of this second generation of KT133 motherboards later this week.

Dipswitches -- control bus speed

Another question mark will be the motherboards and memory. Obviously finding a KT133 motherboard and PC133 memory won't be difficult, but that isn't the case for DDR memory and motherboards based on AMD's 760 chipset.

Speaking of the 760 chipset, let's discuss it in a bit more depth on the next page…